Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By : Daniel Li
Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By: Daniel Li

Overview of this book

With the over-abundance of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it's easy to feel lost. Build tools, package managers, loaders, bundlers, linters, compilers, transpilers, typecheckers - how do you make sense of it all? In this book, we will build a simple API and React application from scratch. We begin by setting up our development environment using Git, yarn, Babel, and ESLint. Then, we will use Express, Elasticsearch and JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to build a stateless API service. For the front-end, we will use React, Redux, and Webpack. A central theme in the book is maintaining code quality. As such, we will enforce a Test-Driven Development (TDD) process using Selenium, Cucumber, Mocha, Sinon, and Istanbul. As we progress through the book, the focus will shift towards automation and infrastructure. You will learn to work with Continuous Integration (CI) servers like Jenkins, deploying services inside Docker containers, and run them on Kubernetes. By following this book, you would gain the skills needed to build robust, production-ready applications.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Importance of Good Code
Index

Chapter 12. Security – Authentication and Authorization

So far in this book, we have developed a simple API that allows anonymous users to create, retrieve, modify, and delete users. This is insecure and impractical for any real-world applications. Therefore, in this chapter, we will begin to secure our API by implementing a rudimentary authentication and authorization layer on top of it. This will also give us a chance to practice the TDD process and work with the CI servers.

The purpose of this chapter is to show you how to implement a stateless authentication and authorization scheme using JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). Being stateless is extremely important to ensure the scalability of our application, something which we will discuss in Chapter 18, Robust Infrastructure with Kubernetes.

By the end of this chapter, our API will be more secure than its current state, but there'll still be a lot more steps we need to take to truly secure it. It'll be impossible to cover all security-related topics...